I have completed my ‘97 Fleer Metal Universe PMG Red football set, and am 50% of the way to the complete PMG Green set. Now I just need to cut them up - if anyone here has steady hands.

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It’s hard to overstate the significance of this set in the hobby. Design innovation and rarity came to a confluence in the late 1990s to create a number of iconic inserts that remain atop the hobby grails today. The emerald green parallels are numbered /10 in basketball and /15 in football, and the ruby red continue upwards to /100 in basketball and /150 in football. While both are considered grail cards for any player lucky enough to be in the set, the greens are often considered the top card for a player. The ’97 Michael Jordan PMG is arguably his second-most iconic card (still would give that to the ’86 Fleer Rookie), but likely the most desired among high-end collectors.

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As a Lions fan, the player that makes this all the more special to me is Barry Sanders. Brett Favre and Emmitt Smith share the spotlight on Sheet A, which interestingly consists of cards 101-200. Sheet B consists of cards 1-100. I’m not sure if it is the presence of the era’s preeminent stars on Sheet A that accounts for the apparent discrepancy in the number of uncut red sheets that have surfaced. I have counted nine unique red Sheet As surfacing publicly, all in the past few years, while only spotting two red Sheet Bs.

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You can see from the salvage that they inconspicuously named these “Parallel Set” at the time, not yet knowing that this would become the hobby defining parallel set for modern sports, and now Marvel, cards. Most of the great contemporary cards pay some homage to hobby history, and that couldn’t be truer for Marvel PMGs, which mirror the design and numbering scheme of the ‘97 sets and have become the grails of this space. The first year of production, 2013, remains atop the mountain, but Upper Deck (who acquired the rights to the Fleer brand) has continued to make PMGs the chase in their continuing Marvel Metal Universe releases.

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I know a lot of people are upset that after market items exist when it takes thousands of packs and years of hunting to find the individual cards, but to me, that is exactly what makes sheets special. A whole era of football is captured in one piece (or two here). Bigger than one player or team. Rarer than any one card. A large, dazzling piece that could occupy a museum wall.

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For whatever reason, the values of sheets seems to be below the sum of its parts. An unnumbered PMG green Brett Favre fetched a price of $11,700, over half the price for that I paid for the complete sheet in the same auction. I suspect there may be a simple explanation that card collectors do not like to deal with anything that cannot fit neatly into their PSA boxes and carried to shows. However, that paradox strongly incentivizes flippers to buy the sheets and chop them up for a quick profit.

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And that’s exactly what has happened. Many of the sheets have been cut up, and while some are graded and designated as “unnumbered,” distinguishing them from their pack-pulled counterparts, there have been instances of bad actors stamping their own serial numbers onto the cards and succesfully passing them off as pack-pulled to graders. Why wouldn’t they when a numbered Favre auctioned for $78,000, over 7x the price of the unnumbered copy, just over a month later? (Fraud should be the answer.) I speculate that the prevalence of after-market copies of the PMG football set accounts for some of the extreme price discrepancy between PMG basketball and football. Preventing the sheet slaughter is another reason that motivated me to acquire these sheets. I both want to prevent further after-market copies, but also want to preserve what I view as a rare museum-quality piece representing a golden era of sports trading cards - the sheets are an endangered species prone to poaching for their parts.

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An interesting note is that while many various sheets were auctioned at the infamous 2005 Fleer Bankruptcy auction, where many after-market cards and most likely these sheets came from, only a small portion were football (see attached auction record, and kick yourself that you didn’t buy these for $1). It is interesting that more PMG football sheets have surfaced than the iconic inserts from other sports given how many fewer football sheets were auctioned, though many others have had at least one or two copies come to auction (e.g. Basketball Essential Credentials). I wonder if there will be many more surfacing in years to come, or if the other sheets referred to in the auction record are lower end releases. I personally will be a bit more conservative with my bidding after seeing so many Sheet As slowly drip into the market, but there is no way to know if the first to surface is the only copy or not.

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Lastly, before doing a separate in-depth post on the topic, I want to briefly touch on the Pokemon card world, where there is something equally as disturbing but suspiciously kept quiet plaguing the high-end trophy cards that have become the most valuable cards in the hobby. I will expand on this soon in a later post, but here is the TLNYR (too long not yet written): the majority of Pokemon trophy cards in circulation and that come to auction, ranging from the “5 million dollar" Pikachu Illustrator and 1997 #1 Trainer trophy cards to the species-collector grail Pokemon Snap Photo Contest prize cards, were not legitimately distributed. They instead originate from an ex-The Pokemon Company employee who hoarded extra copies and has been slowly dripping them into the market for exorbitant prices. This is not known by many collectors, but it is also deliberately overlooked by many other collectors, grading companies who are failing to uphold their primary role as authenticators by not distinguishing these from legitimate copies, and large dealers/influencers and auction houses who have profited immensely off of this fact being ignored. It is Pokemon’s ugliest open secret. Unlike the Green PMG Favre, where the pack-pulled copy sold for 7x the unnumbered copy, there is effectively no difference in auction prices realized between legitimately awarded and extra copies of the Pokemon grails - and maybe this is no surprise when this is kept quiet and there is no distinction on the slabs or in the auction listing descriptions. As every other mature space in collectibles values provenance, including sports cards, I think it will be interesting to see how this disregard for provenance in Pokemon plays out over time - if the word gets out. I love my aftermarket PMG sheets, but I love them for what they are, and I don’t think anyone would want me passing them off as legitimate pack-pulled copies - something for Pokemon collectors to reconsider in their space.

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And no, I couldn’t just make a post about sports cards without dragging non-sports into it 😬 More to come.